Tag: Surveillance

The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, which includes no data-protection provisions, would set up a new network for private corporations to share customer data with nearly all levels of law enforcement and intelligence, including the National Security Agency.

The Peninsula Peace and Justice Center hosted Truthdig Editor-in-Chief Robert Scheer and scholar Aleecia McDonald in a public conversation about the themes at the center of Scheer’s new book, “They Know Everything About You: How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy.”

The Truthdig editor-in-chief spoke about his new book, “They Know Everything About You: How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy,” at a town hall event in Seattle.

The Patriot Act provision that authorized mass surveillance on Americans is set to expire, but don’t be fooled: The snooping is likely to continue. In an interview with Truthdig, Sen. Ron Wyden calls ending dragnet surveillance a “big priority.”

One of the many uncomfortable realities that we all are increasingly obliged to accept, at least on a practical level, is that the many gadgets that power our personal and professional lives can’t ever be fully shielded from prying eyes.

This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: Robert Scheer responds to new revelations about NSA hacks on hard drives and nearly every cell in the U.S. Also, David Blau on the childcare problem.

This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: Robert Scheer responds to new revelations about NSA hacks on hard drives and nearly every mobile phone in the U.S. Also, David Blau on the childcare problem.

A startlingly vigilant new television by Samsung, the SmartTV, monitors what people say through a voice activation feature and, as it’s handily interfacing with the Internet, might just share that information with third parties.

At a time when the surveillance state seems stronger than ever, award-winning poet David Wagoner reminds us that sometimes even the most regimented pursuits may lead to a freedom that can only be found in unexpected places.

The National Security Agency took advantage of the holiday lull in press coverage and released 12 years of internal oversight reports documenting abusive and improper practices by agency employees, The Intercept reports.

“The American surveillance state has an Achilles Heel,” organizers of the OffNow campaign say. “We can thwart mass surveillance without relying on Congress or [the] Supreme Court” by passing legislation that stops “the flow of state supplied water and electricity to federal agencies conducting mass, warrantless surveillance.”

Laura Poitras’ lens wordlessly captured the shock of the journalists, the youthful sincerity of the whistle-blower, and the unfolding tension that mounted as the stories started to get published and Edward Snowden revealed himself as the source to the entire world.

President Obama has called his administration the “most transparent in history,” but instead of allowing companies to be completely transparent regarding their involvement in government surveillance, Washington has muzzled them.

Having seen her remarkable new film on Edward Snowden, “Citizenfour,” in a packed house at the New York Film Festival, I sat down with Laura Poitras in a tiny conference room at the Loews Regency Hotel in New York City to discuss just how our world has changed and her part in it.

The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald writes that a report recently released by the United Nations’ top official for counterterrorism and human rights rejects the “key argument often made by American defenders of the NSA.”

Legal justifications taken up by lawyers for New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration to defend the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslim communities are the same initially put forward by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

According to newly released documents from Edward Snowden’s treasure trove, the National Security Agency not only gave domestic law enforcement entities access to private data, it made it as easy as possible.

The famed fog of war is nothing compared to the fog of the future or, as I’ve often said, I’d be regularly riding my jetpack in traffic through the spired city of New York, as I was promised in my childhood. Our urge to predict the future is unsurpassed. Our ability to see it as it will be: next to nil.

The idea has since been dismissed by other German politicians, but on a morning talk show, Patrick Sensburg, who is leading the Bundestag’s investigation into NSA surveillance, said the government has considered using non-electronic typewriters.

A year-and-a-half after Swartz killed himself because of pressure from felonies he faced over alleged “cyber crimes,” the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act is set to give the government the power to collect and share content from emails, texts or other written communications without a warrant, ACLU adviser Gabe Rottman says.

A spreadsheet leaked by NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden enabled Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept to reveal the identities of five prominent Muslim Americans who were spied on by the National Security Agency, chiefly, it appears, for their political work and religious affiliation. Greenwald comments in an interview with “Democracy Now!”

Even those who believe the National Security Agency’s vacuum-cleaner surveillance of electronic communications does not trample privacy rights should be troubled by this practical implication: If you try to know everything, you end up knowing nothing.

A four-month investigation by The Washington Post revealed that ordinary Internet users, both Americans and non-Americans, “far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks.”